Because reality is beautiful.

Just a quick, throw away post about current events. (Health Care IV will come soon.) Ok, I don’t follow celebrity news, if fact I don’t follow celebrities at all. I’m a big believer in Cintra Wilson’s theory “Celebrity reexamined as a grotesque, crippling disease” . But I feel a need to weigh in on this one.

Miley Cyrus does not disturb me. What deeply, deeply disturbs me is what the world has done to her. She is a goddess of sexless purity. Parents make her hero to their daughters because she is pure, and clean, and good. We know that she is pure, and clean, and good because she is unsullied by any sexuality whatsoever. She has no sexual identity. Her gender exists completely in following social convention. She is the plastic, sexless ken doll of the age, to be dressed and positioned however the narrative of her sexless perfection demands.

The problem of course, is that I am describing a fictional character. This is not the flesh and blood Miley Cyrus, but the highly successful Miley Cyrus brand. Let me steal from Wikipedia here…

Careful brand management, supported by a cleverly crafted advertising campaign, can be highly successful in convincing consumers to pay remarkably high prices for products which are inherently extremely cheap to make. This concept, known as creating value, essentially consists of manipulating the projected image of the product so that the consumer sees the product as being worth the amount that the advertiser wants him/her to see, rather than a more logical valuation that comprises an aggregate of the cost of raw materials, plus the cost of manufacture, plus the cost of distribution. Modern value-creation branding-and-advertising campaigns are highly successful at inducing consumers to pay, for example, 50 dollars for a T-shirt that cost a mere 50 cents to make, or 5 dollars for a box of breakfast cereal that contains a few cents’ worth of wheat.

Ford doesn’t really have a personality. Diseny doesn’t have a personality. These are massive, multinational conglomerates. But people treat brands like people: they have personalities, values, wishes, etc. And the key to the $3.5 million per annum Miley Cyrus brand is the perverts’ idealization of childhood: A perpetual thirteen, one foot poised on childhood, one foot poised on sexuality. Perhaps Britney Spears said it best with the song “I’m not girl, not yet a woman”. Unfortunately for the Britney Spears brand, a perpetual gum chewing, curl twirling 13 year old did not appeal as much to the brand’s name sake as growing up. Britney Spears first real controversy? Her development of full breasts. She went, as most young women will, from a B cup to a C cup.

The spokes person of the brand shattered the sick fantasies of nation by having hormones. The response? Unchecked rage, which only grew worse as she committed such horrible sins having sex drive, or having adult relationships.

Back to Miley Cyrus. Her first controversy was a “topless” photo in Vanity Fair. The words “child pornography”were thrown around. Pornography has a fascinating entomology, being Greek for “Writings about whores”.

If this image is pornographic to you, you need to talk to a therapist. There is nothing sexual about this image at all. (See comment). Unless you’re a pervert. But by doing this photo, she make clear that she had intentions of becoming a woman. That at some point in the future there would a person who was experiencing sexuality instead being totally oblivious to it. And for that, all the perverts were up in arms. They wanted her to stand between girl and woman so they could desire her, but tells themselves it was a pure healthy desire. The image forced them to admit they were sexually attracted to her. And for causing that revelation, she had to become “bad”.

But the point here is Miley Cyrus’s most recent flub. SHE WAS POLE DANCING…SEE

Words like “pole dancing” “leather clad”, “provocative” “dressed like a hooker” were bandied about. Of course, the less popular version of this photo is this…

Yeah, see she wasn’t “pole dancing” she was hanging onto a pole on top of a moving cart so she wouldn’t fall off. It’s called a “stage show”. Her ability to do that, while lip syncing, dancing, smiling, and not smudging her make-up, is one of the reasons she makes a couple million a year and most of us don’t.

But the public has to do this. When ever Miley Cyrus the person (who actaully exists and has needs and desires) conflicts with Miley Cyrus the brand (which is pure fabrication to sell shitty merchandise) society at large must lose it’s pathetic little mind. Because if Miley Cyrus isn’t child anymore, she forces people to admit they are getting old and their attraction to her is a bit perverse. Thinking she is “dirty”, “slutty”, or “bad” is much easier then admitting they have problem. Miley Cyrus’s (TM) owners however, make a lot more money if this pathology is encouraged. Tellingly, the first person called in when she was accused of making child porn was not a lawyer specializing in anti-liable cases, or even a PR rep, but Disney brand consultant.

Oh, and my original thought, before this turned into a multimedia, decently researched post? Just because someone is famous, doesn’t mean they are a role model. In fact, it might just mean they’re not.